The Jordan Harbinger Show - 952: Adam Grant | The Science of Tapping Into Your Hidden Potential

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

When we lack a sense of natural talent, how can we unlock our ability to excel? Find out on this episode with Hidden Potential author Adam Grant! What We Discuss with Adam Grant: When you're going through the repetitive steps necessary to learn a new skill, how can you turn the daily grind into a source of daily joy? Why learning from an expert mentor is not necessarily the best path to success. What are character skills, and why are they more important than cognitive skills or talent when it comes to succeeding? How did a pair of hyperpolyglots go from repeatedly failing to retain languages to speaking dozens fluently? Why we should seek advice we can act upon rather than feedback that only identifies our cheerleaders and critics. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/952 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. If there are multiple people who have high expectations of you, it usually means they've recognized some kind of latent ability or motivation or room for improvement that you just can't recognize yet. And so it feels like, well, if other people, you know, have high expectations of me, but I'm lacking confidence, I'm right, they must be wrong. What we forget, though, is that other people are more neutral, they're more independent, they're more objective,

and if multiple people believe in you, you should probably believe them. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills are the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional neuroscientist war correspondent, Russian spy, or journalist-turned-poker champion. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our

episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, cyber warfare, crime, cults, and more to help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on this show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, when we assess potential, we make the cardinal error of focusing on starting points. We assume the people with the most promise

are the ones who stand out right away. Today in this episode we're debunking all that with my guest, Adam Grant, who's been on the show many times, brilliant guy, as you probably have seen from his many books and articles. Today we'll discuss why we need to focus less on starting points

and more on the distance traveled. Also, why character traits and skills are more important than talent, and discomfort, perfectionism, and why you might not actually want to learn new skills from somebody who is an expert. Come on, folks, it's Adam Grant. You know it's going to be good.

Here we go. Well, just when I thought there might be a year without an Adam Grant book, here we are. It's funny because I feel like every year you go, hey, I'm not writing a book. And then it's like I get the press release six months later from your publicist that you did one anyway. Technically, it's been two and a half years. So I just felt like I was overdue to talk to you. Yeah. I needed to write a book.

Yeah, that's a good excuse. God forbid you should just pick up the phone. You have to write a whole book. You really do create so much. And it's impressive. It's really something. I'm guessing those conversations with your agent go something like, hey, Adam, publisher wants you to write a book. I like making 15%.

What do you think? And then you're like, well, I don't know. I just did one. Maybe I'll take a year off. And then they just have a fishing line with like millions of dollars dangling in front of your window until you decide you want a beach house and relent. Is that, am I close? Is that the process generally? Not even close.

No? Okay. No, it usually starts with me reaching out to my agent and saying, I have a book idea or several. do you think one of these is worth writing? Uh-huh. Okay, that sounds more normal. I think it's really, you must have a huge amount of ideas because I think a lot of people,

when they're strapped for ideas, and you can tell because they write a book and it's like an amalgamation of other people's books, and your books aren't like that. And I appreciate that, and I'm sure everybody appreciates that, actually, but your latest book, Hidden Potential, it makes a really interesting argument that I hadn't really heard before,

which is, in part, that we shouldn't judge people's potential by how someone begins in a specific field, but how far they travel to get there. And it kind of flips the way that you look at these individuals and their achievements on its head. So, I don't know, maybe it's best to start simple. Why do some people excel where other people don't? I love the way you just described it, Jordan. So let me maybe pick up where you left off, which is so many of us judge potential by starting points. And I've been guilty of this in my own life. I remember starting out as a springboard diver and getting called Frank.

because I couldn't even touch my toes without bending my knees. Oh, man. No flexibility whatsoever. And I was terrible. And if I had judged my potential by that early lack of natural talent, I would have quit. And the same thing happened to me as a public speaker, as a writer. I started out struggling. And I think we were constantly counting ourselves out when a task doesn't come easily to us.

And we're constantly underestimating others who struggle early on too. And I think that's a huge mistake because in the long run, if you look at actually, actually, who has the greatest slope of improvement? It's not the people with the most talent. It's the people with the most motivation. I love this study that Benjamin Bloom did, where he looked at world-class athletes, artists, musicians, and scientists, and found that the vast majority of them did not stand out when they were kids. Their early teachers, their early coaches, even their own parents, didn't always see their ability. And when they did stand out, it was not because they were prodigies. It was because they were extra-driven and passionate.

and focused. And yeah, I think we all intuitively know the value of those attributes, but we still undervalue them. Yeah, you give a really good example right in the beginning of the book with this chess. Is it a chess team or a chess league? I don't even know what you call. It's like a chess organization, I suppose. And it's a bunch of kids that are sort of, there's the rich kids school, I guess, and then there's the underprivileged kid club. And they're really good. And you think, like, what, how did that happen? These are kids that their neighborhoods, I think, had like gang violence and there was a lot of just what you would imagine in a low income area full of kids that are subjected to all the stresses that that involves. And one of your conclusions from that

was that what might appear as natural talent to some people could actually be traced instead to access and opportunity or to motivation. And I thought that was interesting, motivation, because access and opportunity, it sort of seems obvious, but then you think like, okay, motivation, Why would somebody be less motivated when they come from that area to be good at chess? And I'm still not sure why. What would be the effect on motivation? Maybe you're just motivated to do other things like survive or get through high school. Is that what you mean by that?

Yeah, I think that's part of the story. So if you think about these raging rucks, they're a group of poor racial minorities in Harlem. And a lot of them, it wouldn't even occur to them to them to play chess because it's not going to pay the bills. It's not going to keep them alive, to your point. And then some of them end up learning chess. One of them actually gets taught the game by a drug dealer in a park. But I mean, you can't imagine going from there to competing at the national chess championships. And I think so often people think that motivation is going to come from within.

The reality is if you don't see a path, you can't dream of the destination. So I think nobody believed in these kids. They had no reason to believe in themselves. And chess is stereotyped as a game of genius. It's supposed to be for a bunch of prodigies who are usually white and rich. And I think that actually becomes a barrier to motivation, not just opportunity. Yeah, I think if you're a person of color growing up in, I don't know, Detroit or Harlem, and you look at people who play chess and they're just like these nerdy Russian dudes or something like that

or like kids from West Bloomfield or whatever, Michigan, you're not thinking like, I can do that. You're just thinking those people are aliens. What are they even doing? I will never see one of those things in real life, chess boarding. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And you're probably going to stay there if you're not lucky enough to have a coach like Maurice Ashley. Maurice is, I think, you could just stop and say, you know, he was the first African-American chess grandmaster.

He's amazing in his own accomplishments. But I was even more impressed with what he was able to do as a coach. So Maurice sees hidden potential in these kids. And one of the ways he lights a fire of motivation is he teaches them the game of chess backward. Instead of, you know, okay, here's how you do an opening move, you can move a pawn up two squares or one square. He puts just a few pieces on the board and says, let me teach you how to checkmate. And then they get the thrill of victory, they get the agony of defeat, and they want to know how do I win. And the excitement of knowing how to finish the game gets them more interested in learning how to begin it.

And I've actually started to wonder after learning from Maurice, should we teach everything backwards? Yeah. Any skill that we want to learn, should we start at the end point and then reverse as opposed to saying, well, let's pick up a, like I think about kids learning music all the time on this and, you know, just doing scales over and over again is really boring. Yeah. What if you could teach them the closing sounds of a piece? Would that fire them up more? I think that's true. Look, when I played the flute because I love getting bullied, but when I played the flute in elementary school, we had all these really hard things where you had to do like read sheet music and then it would be. like, okay, here's a bunch of really hard notes to play in a row, and here's these little drills that teach you skills that are kind of tricky to build. And I just went to the music store

and bought, I think it was called TV theme songs of the 90s or something like that. And it was like the A team. What's the punky Brewster? Cheers. Just a bunch of stuff like that. And I would just sit at home. Tell me you had greatest American hero. I probably, yeah, like, believe it or not, yeah, I'm walking on air. That one, that kind of stuff, like the George Costanza answering machine theme. George isn't at home. Yeah, that's right. I just played those.

And my parents are like, oh, look, you're so good at the flute. You must have natural talent. And of course, the teacher was like, no, you need to learn how to do the stuff that's in the book, the textbook, essentially, for the music. You basically are failing. But then we had another teacher who was like, hey, you just are refusing to do the work that's in the textbook, right? And I'm like, yeah, I don't get it.

I want to play music. I'm already playing music. This isn't music. It's like some notes on the page that don't say. sound like anything. So I'm not doing that. I'm doing this instead. And he liked that, but you know, your grade is based on what's in the book, not based on what you can actually do with the musical instrument, which now that I say it out loud makes absolutely no sense. None whatsoever. And I think this goes to the fundamental challenge that people face when they want to build skills, which is

a lot of the early practice is really boring and repetitive. And you try to push yourself through it over and over again. At some point, you burn out. And even before that, you might fall victim to what psychologist called bore out, which is when you're literally bored out of your mind. And I think there are ways that we could, you know, instead of just saying, I'm going to use willpower to suffer through the daily grind, let me try to turn the daily grind into a source of daily joy. And I met a parent recently when I was on book tour who said, I actually found a way to do this with my son who told me he hated reading. And I said, fine, you can watch any TV show or movie you want, but you have to turn the sound off and have subtitles. Oh, wow. And guess what? He fell in love with

reading. I thought that was ingenious. That is genius. It probably won't work with a four-year-old who can't quite read it quickly or anything for that matter yet. Not yet. But yeah, that is a really good idea because then it's like, oh, I want to watch Sonic the Hedgehog. Okay, fine, but you've got to do it with the subtitles. And then at some point, it's like, oh, this is just like a book, but there's a cartoon that's kind of annoying in the way. Why don't I just pick up the book and read it on my own time and bring it with me everywhere. At my own pace, too. Yeah, not have to like rewind it because I missed the word. That's a really good idea. I love the idea. I love the idea. of teaching things backwards.

I think in the book, you kind of called this scaffolding, or at least part of this was called scaffolding. And in languages, I guess that's something like, what, learning a few phrases and starting to talk as opposed to spending the first two months or whatever repeating the sounds on a letter chart like you do in a classroom or conjugating verbs, that's the thing that everybody has to do.

And everybody hates. Yeah. Yeah. When psychologists talk about scaffolding, they start with a building metaphor and say, okay, you're supposed to set up a temporary structure so you can reach a height that you couldn't on your own, and then you stabilize the building,

and then you remove this support, and it can stand on its own. And I think learning is supposed to work similarly that a lot of people think they need a permanent teacher or mentor or coach who's going to be with them for years. And that's not true. What's necessary to grow is something much more accessible to all of us, which is somebody who can provide

the initial instruction or even a YouTube tutorial, where you get the basics that you need to learn, And then you remove the support and try to become more independent. And over time, that puts you in charge of your own progress, which is both more motivating and more confidence-building than having to rely on somebody else. How do we build this for ourselves when we're learning a new skill? Do we really just go straight to YouTube? Or are there kind of rules that you might?

Are there any sort of pro-tips or, like, requirements that good scaffolding has? Well, my assumption was you should immediately go and study the best. you know, whatever you want to learn, find a person who's a world expert on it and, you know, watch them do it. And I learned through writing this book that that is not the best way to go back. Yeah. Because they're so far from where you are that it's pretty difficult to imagine yourself closing the distance. And often their expert skills are not going to help you as a novice. The person you want to study in many cases is somebody who's just one or two steps ahead of you, where they're much more relatable. They can help you strike a balance between what's aspirational and what's

achievable. And so I would look for a role model who's within reach as opposed to somebody who just seems to be on another planet. Yeah, I think that's wise. It doesn't make sense to me to learn how to put from Tiger or hold a golf club from Tiger Woods because he's just thinking like, gosh, I haven't had to learn this in so long. He's going to be thinking like, okay, let me think about how to teach this. Meanwhile, somebody who teaches only the beginnings basics of golf has like a 10 point checklist or whatever where all your fingers should be on the club. And that's the guy that you want to learn from, even if he has zero green jackets

or whatever the master's thing is, because that's the guy who can teach beginners, not the guy who's got a gold medal from the Olympics or whatever for diving or whatever you're trying to learn. You described that so beautifully. I think my whole life I've heard people say, those who can't do teach. And actually what the research shows

is that those who can do often can't teach the basics. It's called the curse of knowledge. You've come so far that it's hard for you to relate to what a beginner is experiencing. And you know, you're going to either struggle to explain what you know or you're going to teach them techniques that they're not ready for yet. And that ultimately does a disservice to the person who's not at your level yet. It makes perfect sense to me.

People will often ask what my advice is for starting a podcast, which I started my podcast 16 years ago, so none of it is remotely relevant right now. And then they'll say, oh, okay, fine, give me some interviewing advice. And I remember this is years ago, like the first time somebody asked me this. And I was like, oh, what you want to do is, and I have to pull this out of the air, because I don't remember exactly what I said. But it was something like, you want to make sure that your notes are set up such that you have this teleprompter in front of you and blah, blah, blah, and you got to make sure that you have good rapport with the guests. And I do that by this and this and this. And they're like, so you take notes on what you're going to talk about.

And I was like, oh, we're going like way back. And I had to keep doing that over and over and over until I realized I'm not helping this person at all. They need somebody who's like, first read the book, highlight some stuff, take the highlights, put it in a go. Google Doc, maybe even go before that kind of thing and tell them like, look people in the eye and small talk with them before the show. It's like they really, really need this basics, basics. And yeah, I'm not the guy for that when it comes to podcasting, just like somebody who's a pro athlete is not good to learn the beginnings of how to shoot pool, for example, from a billiards champion. Those guys are like, yeah, just put some spin on the ball when you do that next time. It's like,

what is that even mean? Like, no. Don't know how to do that, but thanks. And Jordan, what's also interesting about that is you could probably cross that chasm if you watch the person in action for a couple minutes. That makes sense. And see, okay, here's where they are. Here's what I need to explain to them. You know, I think also that person watching you might learn more than being directly taught by you because if they watch you, they'd see, oh, one of the things you do that's interesting and different from a lot of people who think their job is to interview is you don't just ask questions. You respond. And you have even sometimes just a short reaction that elicits a new thought from the guest, and then it becomes a let's both think out loud conversation as opposed to

you're asking questions and I'm regurgitating things I already know. And that's something you might not think to share because it comes naturally to you and you've been doing it for a decade and a half. Yeah. If somebody was even just listening to your podcast for a couple of minutes, they would notice it. That's an interesting point that I also had not thought about. You're right. There's a lot of thinking out loud. Some people will say, Jordan, you talk too much and I'm thinking, isn't that kind of the point? Also, I named the show after myself. So if you didn't see this coming, that one's on you. Yeah, but I mean, my favorite podcasts to listen to are always conversations that go in unexpected

directions. They're not interviews, like, formal journalism at all. Actually, that's quite insightful. You mentioned the curse of knowledge. That's the idea, what does you call it, a cognitive bias, or is that like a logical fallacy, or is that just a, what category does that fall into? I think there was an early call-in-camera paper about it, and I think it probably falls in the category of cognitive bias.

Cian Bylock, who's a great cognitive scientist, now the president of Dartmouth, she described it this way. She said, as you get better and better at a skill, your ability to communicate that skill gets worse and worse. It's just, it's on autopilot. That's unfortunate. It's unfortunate, but it makes perfect sense. Why is that? Because you pack the stuff into your subconscious autopilot routines and there it lay forever? Yeah, it seems to become tacit knowledge.

It's implicit rather than explicit. You don't have to think about it to do it. And then you spend a lot of years practicing it without thinking about it, and you're sort of unconsciously competent. And that doesn't mean you couldn't learn to explain it or teach it. It just means that you would have to unpack it. You'd have to study it. You'd have to watch it in order to get as good at coaching as you were at doing.

Right. It's like a separate, it's just a separate skill entirely. Would you agree that is better to learn from somebody who knows a skill and has zero talent versus from somebody who has a lot of talent, given equal levels of experience, I guess. You have to throw that in there. Yeah. If two people are equally experienced, I'd rather learn from the less talented person because odds are they had to work harder to get where they are. And that means they've studied the skill

more carefully. They've probably run more experiments, lots more trial and error. They can tell you what's worked for them and what hasn't. They can also give you new ideas for things to try that didn't work for them but might apply to you. I think that that person is probably more of a student than the person who just got where they are pretty effortlessly. That makes a lot of sense. And also, it's pretty good news for people hiring coaches because the ones that are the most expensive are usually going to be the people that are already making millions of dollars or whatever, doing the thing that they're doing. So it's quite good news that somebody who you could probably pay like 30 to 50 bucks or whatever

an hour because they're not famous or they're not wealthy is the person that's actually better to learn from. You don't have to pay 10 grand for that hour-long Tiger Woods charity lesson that you want to take. You can pay 10 grand for a year of golf lessons from somebody who, it does not have green jackets and trophies in a giant yacht. That reminds me of another point in the Benjamin Bloom's study of these world-class performers in different fields. One of the things they tended to have in common was they had an early coach or teacher

who made learning fun. That first person who introduced you to the skill was not a star coach. They weren't the person that you sought out. Usually it was you learned the piano from the neighborhood teacher who just taught music as a hobby. But what they did was they made it interesting and enjoyable. And that led you to think of practices as something you wanted to do as opposed to something you had to do. And instead of pushing yourself to do it, you felt pulled into it.

And gosh, I would love to see more people introduced to skills that way. Yeah, that's really, I suppose that's good news because it means we know where to target the learning for young kids, right? Like just make sure their kindergarten experience is bang on. Although that's also tough for public schools, right? where they're now like, hey, you have 45 kids in next year's class. And some of them are special needs and you have zero help. I know it's your first year teaching, but you're going to go go get them, Tiger. And the teacher's just like tearing their hair out and burned out by spring break.

It's a massive problem. And I think it's gotten worse over time. I read some evidence that kindergarten has become more like first grade in the U.S. Really? So you're spending more time doing basic math, learning how to spell and write, and less time learning about dinosaurs and space. and other things that make learning fun. Oh, man.

And it's the exact opposite of what we should be doing if we wanna cultivate the joy of learning, which ultimately leads to more learning over time. I'm looking at schools now for my four and a half year old son, and some of them are downright scary. I went into one, I won't give away the name, people in the Bay Area all know it because it's famous for this. But you go in there and it's like,

this is where our kids are learning. And you see manually done, I'm getting PTSD flashbacks looking at these kids' homework. And they're in kindergarten in first grade, and it's like long division, multiplication. And I'm thinking, I think I learned that in third grade. You know, that's when, and this is kindergarten, first grade. And I'm just thinking like, okay, these are future engineers for sure, good on them. But do the kids enjoy this or are they in hell right now doing this?

It does not look fun at all. So you enrolled? So I enrolled myself, yeah, but I'm keeping my son away from it. Yeah, it was terrifying. and it was a lot of it's cultural. There's a lot of people from other countries that, like, they just value academics to the point where I'm thinking,

oh my God, the stress level your kids must be under is next level. And I get it. They grew up in a country where if you didn't work your butt off, you lived in a place with no running water and sifted through garbage at a dump or something to survive. So I get why they're like that, but I'm thinking like, geez, do we want to raise every generation like this?

Or is this like you made the sacrifice and you got them to the Bay Area? maybe take your foot off the gas for like a second and let them enjoy their life. I don't know. I mean, it's a hard decision to make, right? You can't tell people to not make their kids focus on academics,

but it sounds like your research says, hey, this isn't going to work for everyone if you make them all into calculus geniuses by third grade. Some of them are going to burn out and not do well and hate learning and hate school and not do it anymore. That's a big risk.

And the research on this is, to me, even a skill like reading. If you look at a country like Finland, they deliberately have, in a lot of cases, illiterate kindergartners, which is counterintuitive. But if you think about it, the stuff that you can read at age five for the average kid is not interesting. Run spot run. Yeah. That's not going to get you interested in reading. So what they do is they wait until kids show interest or, you know, some obvious readiness.

And then, you know, they welcome them in. And if you start a little bit later at six or seven, kids have a more sophisticated vocabulary. And then they can start reading more interesting books from the get-go. You don't have to see too many of these studies or too many examples in other countries before you start to think, we're doing something wrong in America. You know, I got held back in kindergarten, but then we had a split class. And I could do all the reading from the split class, but I was terrible or everything else. I couldn't pay attention.

My thing was not Jordan can't do the work. My thing was he finishes his. his work and then he talks loud and disrupts the class and he won't ever shut up and nothing we do is going to change that. It was a preview of things to come. It was just a foregone conclusion that I would be doing what I'm doing right now. Yeah. And I had the same loud voice.

So like if 10 kids were talking, the teacher heard my voice and was like, Jordan, really? Again, you can't focus for five seconds. It was interesting, though, my mom was like, my son is smart. He can read better than anyone else in the class. And it's a split kindergarten first grade class the second year that I was there. and he's the best reader in the class. To your point, it's true. I remember they were going through this book

that was C-Spot Run, there's the sun, the dog jumps over the rock or whatever, those kinds of things. And they spent, you know, the first month reading that and I read it before class one day and one go. And the teacher was like, I remember she goes, wow, you can read that whole book. And then they were like,

uh, we need him in the first grade reading class, but he needs to be in the kindergarten thing for everything. And they basically had to rearrange the class because it was just clear that I was not the dumbass that I was projected to be at that point. But it was because, in part, yeah, had a bigger vocabulary, and reading was more interesting

so I could sort of skip all that. Because I know people are thinking, oh, well, they got to start somewhere. How do you start reading if you can't read C-Spot Run? You're not just going to pick up Harry Potter. That is kind of a valid pushback, I think, right? Yeah, I think it is. I think the idea is that you want to make the transition faster.

And in order to do that, you need to know more words. Otherwise, it's going to take you a couple of years to get to Harry Potter, as opposed to maybe a couple weeks or a couple months. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Adam Grant. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, creators every single week, it's because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at 6-minute networking.com. I know networking is a gross word. It's kind of cringy. This course is very easy. It's not

cringy at all. It's very down to earth. It's not going to be awkward strategies that make you look bad or make other people feel bad. Just some practical stuff that'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer. I teach this stuff all over the place, especially to government, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, things like that. It is very useful whether you're a student

or you're retired or you're in the middle of your career. It takes a few minutes a day, and many of the guests on the show already subscribe and contribute to the course. So hey, come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course again for free over at six-minute networking.com.

Now, back to Adam Grant. This is probably outside the scope of this conversation, but how do you just get a kid to get that bigger vocabulary? Do you just have them talk a lot with other people? Is that how you do it? I don't know. Yeah, exposure to words turns out to be a factor. Daniel Willingham has a book on this where he says, look, we shouldn't underestimate the role of knowledge in learning. There's a lot of talk about teaching kids and adults how to think, but a precursor to being able to think well is having a lot of information at your fingertips. and vocabulary is a basic building block of knowledge. So yeah, I guess exposure to words, being in conversation,

I guess that seems to be a starting point, but I'm no expert, so what do I know? Yeah, I don't know, yeah, I'm just going by it, because again, yeah, I know I'm asking you stuff that's way outside the scope of the book, but it's interesting. People who go very far are less often freaks of nature and more often freaks of nurture.

Again, very clever, I assume you made that up. Your publisher must have loved that one. You know what? I wanted it to be the title. The book was called Freaks of Nurture. Oh, that's a good title. Well, I thought it was too, and there were some of us who loved it and everyone else hated it and said, look, I don't aspire to be a freak. Oh.

You should frame this as something that people actually want. And everybody wants to unlock their hidden potential, and that's where we landed. Hidden potential is a great title. And it's sort of more on brand with like your originals and your other stuff. Not that my opinion matters. The book has already been printed, so no one can change it anyway. You know, there's always the paperback. That's true.

And they're also the foreign translations. That's true. You never know. Yeah, that's true. If hidden potential doesn't translate, just change it into freaks of nurture, which definitely won't translate. Not a chance. That was another complaint about it.

That's a good point. Because freak, it's like the word crazy. It could be something fun in English, but when you use it in another language, it's like deeply insulting, and it's like, ooh, you don't want to run that. No, the wordplay on freak of nature is the only thing that makes it work. And if you don't have the phrase freak of nature in the language, it just all falls apart. Oh, right. You know, I hadn't thought of that.

Good thing other people are on this. I would be terrible at this job. I know. My publisher, it was funny. Actually, U.S. and UK both came back and said, love the book proposal, hate the title. No, you just killed my darling. But I'm going to use the phrase in the book. Yeah, there you go.

And there it is. And look at you picking up on it. It's a sound. I mean, look, I didn't, and it's an audio book, too. It's not like this was in bold and underlined or a chapter heading. I mean, maybe it is, but I couldn't see that. So, yeah, it does stick out well. It's very memorable.

We talked about the effect of a great kindergarten teacher. it sort of makes me sad than that we're front-loading these teachers with all kinds of crap and making them do something that's kind of the opposite of what they should be doing according to what it looks like your research is showing. You go further and say that character skills are actually more important than talent. Can you tell us what character skills actually are? Because what does that mean? Yeah, so let's look at this in the context of West African entrepreneurs.

I love this experiment. So you get 1,500 founders. They're randomly assigned to different experiences. So there's a pure control group. Nothing happens to them. And then there's a cognitive skills training group that basically gets taught the fundamentals of business. They spend a week learning, marketing, and finance and operations, accounting, and sales.

Two years later, that group is 11% more profitable on average. So there's a benefit of learning the cognitive skills of business. There's another group, though, that's 30% more profitable. And they've been randomly assigned not to learn cognitive skills. of skills, but character skills. The skills, if you want to break them down, in that particular experiment, we're looking at being proactive, disciplined, and determined. To be proactive, they practice anticipating market opportunities instead of just reacting to them and waiting for them to come. To be disciplined and determined, they think through the obstacles they might face and then how they

might overcome them. And it's those skills that really affect your ability to learn. And I don't think most of us appreciate the importance of character skills. I think we think about character as a virtue, Right. Not realizing it actually requires knowledge. So Jordan, actually, let's think about this. Remember the marshmallow test of willpower? Yes, and I was wondering if that's real. I meant to ask you because it's one, now that we're in that whole like, hey, by the way,

half the science that you read about on all these books is a bunch of BS. I'm wondering is like, what's the next sacred cow that's going to get slaughtered now? So is the marshmallow test real? If so, yes, cool. Continue. Good news. The marshmallow test has been replicated recently. Great.

So it turns out if you are offered one marshaled, marshmallow as a preschooler, and you can delay that gratification to wait 15 minutes for two marshmallows, you get better SAT scores and better grades a decade later, which is kind of neat. I always thought about that as, you know, just strength of will. Those kids have superhuman discipline. But if you go back and watch the videos, or if you look at the more recent research, what you see is it's actually less willpower and more skill power. Some of the videos are hysterical.

You'll see kids, they want to make the temptation less tempting. Yes. And so one of them actually sort of smushes the marshmallow into a ball and starts bouncing it, and now it's gross. Another hides the marshmallow and puts it out of sight. And that's a basic skill of character to say, I want to make sure that I don't fall victim to this gooey treat. And so I'm going to use a little bit of my knowledge to try to change the situation and make it easier for me. And that, to me, is character skills in action. My wife and I were really excited.

As you know, the holidays are approaching. and we had some putty from overseas, send us these, you know, those kinder eggs where there's like a toy inside. So it's that, but there's a stuffed animal that pops out of the top. That's the packaging. It's really enticing. So I showed those to everyone and I said, these are for Christmas and my son goes, oh, I want it now. And I was like, well, you can. It's for Christmas. And he goes, where are you putting that? And I said, I'll put it in my office. He goes, you should hide it because if I see that, I'm going to want it. And I thought, this is, that is really good self-awareness. My wife and I were like, look at him, just knowing his weak point and being like, you better hide that.

I mean, your son just aced the character skills test. Yeah. Right there. We were very stoked because, of course, this is literally like the week I'm reading the book. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure that Adam Grant would approve of this answer, of this strategy of hiding. You got my stamp. Yeah, the stamp. How do we know that the character skills are more important than talent?

Is there, did somebody measure this or is it just like, hey, they're both important? There are a couple ways we could look at this. I think one would be, let's go to the research on. kindergarteners. So Raj Chetty and his colleagues, superstar team of economists, they look at data from a massive sample of kids in Tennessee. And what they see is that the kids who have more experienced kindergarten teachers randomly assigned actually go on to be more likely to graduate from college, and then they end up also earning more money in their 20s. Like, wait, your kindergarten teacher matters that much? What are they doing? Well, you can break that down and you can look at cognitive skills,

It turns out if you had a more experienced kindergarten teacher, you do get an edge in math and reading. So we want to know why. What are those experienced kindergarten teachers doing? One of the things you can measure is the cognitive skills they teach. Yes, the kids who have a more experienced kindergarten teacher do get an edge in math and reading. But that edge fades over time. The other kids catch up in first, second, third grade. They also get an edge in something else, which is character skills.

They get rated as more disciplined, more determined, more proactive, also more pro-social and trying to help their classmates and make the learning experience better for everyone. And those character skills stick with them. The kids who had the experience kindergarten teachers are doing better on character skills as rated by their fourth grade teacher, again, by their eighth grade teacher.

And then if you use those character skills to predict their income in their 20s, the character skills matter almost two and a half times as much as the cognitive skills. Wow. So what that tells us, I think, is that character skills may be more important than cognitive skills,

especially if you combine that with the evidence on entrepreneurs, same skills we teach in kindergarten and in midlife are more valuable than the ones that we think are for the task. The talent question, I think, there's another piece of data in the Chetty analysis, which is you can also look at their starting math and reading scores before they have the kindergarten teachers. And those are also less predictive than the character skills that they build. I don't think the character skills are more important than talent in every task or every field. I think what I would say is that in general, raw talent is probably a little bit overrated, and character skills are underrated.

That should be a relief for pretty much everybody, I suppose, because you can build, it's hard to just build, I mean, I don't know, I think the definition of talent is you don't build it, right? It's just there. Character skills can be, I assume they can be taught, right? Correct me if I'm wrong, they can be taught and learned and developed, and in fact, that's kind of the whole point. Yeah, I mean, if they couldn't be taught, there would be no effect of kindergarten teachers

on character skills. There would be no effects with these West African entrepreneurs. I mean, just a week of practicing, like being proactive and disciplined and determined, and two years later, your profits go up by 30 percent while the control group doesn't change at all and the cognitive skills group is getting barely a third of that benefit. I mean, that's staggering. It suggests that not only are these skills teachable and learnable, but we can learn them at any point in life and it may not take as long as we think. That's really good news. I love the idea of embracing discomfort. You mentioned this kind of when it came to language learning. This totally makes sense, right? When you immerse yourself in a language and you move, you pick yourself up and you move

to Japan, you learn Japanese better than you do if you're on duolingo every day or whatever. And there's no refuge for you to get comfortable. Like if you want to eat, you got to figure out how to go and get that food and read the menu or talk to the waitress unless you're just pointing at pictures, which gets old fast. But it seems like school kind of destroys a lot of this because we're not necessarily, I mean, yes, maybe things are uncomfortable if you don't understand them, but that's not really what we're talking about here, right? Yeah, I was blown away by these polyglots that I met while I was researching this book. So Benny and Sarah Maria both struggled to learn languages in school.

Benny thought he basically just didn't have the language gene. He tried Irish, he tried German, couldn't do it. Sarah Maria thought she missed the critical window. You know, her dad spoke fluent Spanish. Maybe if I had started learning it when I was a baby, then I would have. but it's too late for me and she could not she could not get Spanish down I think they're both great examples of hidden potential because they're now able to speak I would say from talking to them and looking at how they were scored

Benny can converse in a dozen languages now and Sarah Maria's got at least 10 it's insane and they're both fluent in more than half a dozen so how did they do it well what they realize is that in school they were able to take a bunch of language classes and a bunch of tests without ever really using the language They weren't forced to speak it and communicate in it. And that means they didn't internalize it. Mostly the tests were written. And we all know that the only real way to learn a language is actually to talk out loud.

So I think their advice is you've got to become uncomfortable if you want to learn that skill because the whole reason people don't use a language is they think they need to master it before they say the words because they don't want to embarrass themselves. I don't want to sound like an idiot. I don't want to feel like an idiot. So I hold back. And when Benny finally overcame his hurdle, he actually set the goal of making 200 mistakes a day. Wow.

He would literally pick up, leave for a foreign country. His goal was to get proficient in a language in two or three months. And he'd say, all right, I'm literally just going to memorize a sentence introducing myself. And my hope is I make lots of mistakes because that will mean I'm making lots of attempts. And if I can accept that discomfort, I'm going to learn much faster. People are going to correct me. I'm going to get used to putting different words together, and my competence is going to grow over time.

And this is another one of those twists on, like people say, use it or lose it. Maybe first we should say use it, or you might never gain it in the first. It doesn't quite have the same ring to it, but is equally. No, but more accurate. Yeah, more accurate.

Yeah, exactly. Look, that chives completely with my experience. I moved to Germany. I spent 10 months there. I went to a public high school. Now I still remember the words for like carbon. and oxygen and stuff like that in German, and I'm basically fluent in German.

I've spent over 10 years learning Chinese one or two hours a week on Skype and using some app-based flashcards, and I'm conversational, but I am not as fluent in Chinese as I am in German. And it's like I've spent 10 plus years learning Chinese and 10 months learning German and my German is twice, three times.

I don't even know how you can measure better than my Chinese. It's not even close. How much of that is because are you doing Mandarin? Yeah. It's a harder language than Germans. You think that's also a factor? That's a factor. Yeah, it's funny.

I wasn't necessarily going to bring this up. But you're right. That's definitely a factor. I think if I had spent 10 years learning Russian, I would be much, much further ahead. Because the problem is, a lot of it is vocate. It's not like, oh, I don't understand the grammar. It's purely vocabulary learning.

And that's very, very hard when you can't just read a word and you've got to memorize a symbol. Because you're mapping symbols to words, which then you have to memorize the sound for that word. but if you can read it like Russian, you just have to learn Cyrillic alphabet, which I learned the Cyrillic alphabet in less than a week. And I can still write Cyrillic alphabet in cursive

even though I learned it like my sophomore year of college. So that stuff, yeah, I think a large part of it is Mandarin is just way, way harder than most other languages for that reason. But to your point, I think it would be a different equation if you were able to put yourself in a situation where you were forced to use it. So in Benny's case, we've established he has not, not a natural language learner. He's not one of these people who just picks up a language without

having to really concentrate. He got to proficiency in Mandarin moving to China after five months. I could see that. I think if you were to add up the total time that he put in using the language may not be different from the time you put in 10 years. Yeah, in fact, he might have even gotten more because I'm literally talking about a couple hours a week on a good week learning Chinese, and that's mostly conversational stuff. So yeah, there's a lot of that. I do wonder, I'm curious, I should ask him if he can read and write as well, because that also adds just, like, ridiculous amounts of work to the load. If you're just talking, it's amazing that he got fluent in five months in Mandarin from just talking.

That's incredible in itself. I am curious, if you can also read and write, it's just like it blows my mind. Well, it sounds like a future podcast. I think the thing that intrigues me about Benny and also Sarah Maria is they're kind of seen as professional language hackers. But I looked at them and thought, no, these people are actually professional learners. They can take something that's completely foreign. They can absorb it and become experts in it in a fraction of the time that most of us do. And it's because of their methods, not their talent.

You're right. I know they probably have a bunch of things that's like, here's the best practice to learn this and here's the best practice to learn that. But I bet you that the number one thing at the top of the list with a bullet that supersedes everything else is go there and actually use it. All this other stuff on this list is like, we'll help you memorize other things or correct your mistakes faster. but if you're just not there speaking and listening, probably none of that other stuff matters as much at that point,

if I had to guess. I think that's right. Sarah Maria had a, I was asking her, where should I start if I wanted to learn a new language? And she said, okay, you know, one of the things you can do is- Expedia.com. Yeah.

Book your flights. Yeah, go. But if you don't have that opportunity, she said, you know, other than memorizing a phrase and starting to introduce yourself to people, she said, you can spam your brain. So, you know, take your favorite show,

let's say you're a big friends fan, and watch it in the language you want to learn. I thought that was a great idea, and it's definitely something that could accelerate your progress, but it's not going to get you all the way there, as you're saying. The TV thing is quite useful for languages, but you kind of have to do it while you're there. Like when I was learning Spanish in Mexico and I would come home and be tired, I'm like, I'm going to watch the Sony network, which had friends on it, to your point. And I'll look at the subtitles, which I think were, I can't remember if it had, subtitles in Spanish or subtitles in English and it was dubbed.

but that was helpful, but it wasn't like, oh, you're at home in Toronto, you can just watch Spanish friends and learn Spanish. It's not quite the same thing. It's more like that's how you relax but still end up learning a little bit while you're in country. I know it's important to seek discomfort, though, not just embrace it when it hits you. And I think that there's a little distinction there that's quite important because like you mentioned Benny was doing, he was going out and saying, I'm going to make 200 mistakes. not just like, okay, when I go out to dinner tonight, I'm going to try to order off the menu in Spanish or Esperanto or whatever. I guess there's no country that uses Esperanto in Chinese or whatever, and I'm going to tolerate it.

I mean, he was just like, how do I throw myself into as many uncomfortable situations, 200 per day, as I can and get those reps in? There's a difference there in intensity that I think matters. I think so, too. The research by Willie and Fishbach shows that if you give people just the goal of learning, they actually don't learn as much as if you tell them, deliberately make yourself uncomfortable. You can see this with people learning to do improv comedy,

for example. The ones who are assigned the goal of being uncomfortable actually end up improving more than the ones who are just told to improve. And I think that's because when you're focused on learning, you tend to take small incremental steps. Whereas when you're trying to be uncomfortable, you're going to challenge yourself a lot more. And that puts you in situations that have at least the potential to catapult you. So Jordan, I live this with public speaking. I'm an introvert. You know this. I'm also, at least, I used to be extremely shy. And I remember doing my first guest lectures and giving out feedback forums and students writing things like, you remind me of a Muppet. Oh, brutal. That's so hard to. I mean, and this was at

Michigan where Midwest Nice is a thing. Right. Yeah. So I can only imagine what they were really thinking. There was another student who wrote that I was so nervous, I was causing them to physically shake in their Oh, that's brutal. Yeah, it was not fun. One of the things that got me through that was I didn't just dip my toe in the shallow end. I dove head first into the deep end. I think what a lot of people would do just to, you know, to learn, just to say, all right, I'm going to practice.

I'll do a five-minute mini lecture. Maybe I'll, you know, gather a few people to give me pointers. I volunteered to give hour-long guest lectures in front of an audience of hundreds of students. I don't know what I was thinking. I don't know why my friends let me do it because I was terrible. But you do a bunch of those, and you learn a lot more, a lot faster by collecting all that input and practicing, you know, in a high-stakes environment. Yeah. That, to me, was living proof of the seek discomfort.

Don't just embrace it when it comes. I agree. A friend of mine is writing his first book, and he's like, when I do my media tour, I need tips. And I said, start now before your book comes out and do all these little small podcasts that will have you and talk about the book you're writing. And you're not blowing those opportunities because the audiences are small, but you're still going to get. interviewed and grilled and you're going to have to think about the content, you're going to have to talk into the mic and not look up to the right and have your mouth off of Target or you're going to get the lighting right and you're going to be so comfortable by the time you actually

have to do a high-stakes appearance. It'll be easy by then because you need to get those reps in. Not only that, but the content's going to be better too. Jordan, you're describing every author's dream of doing the book tour before the book has done. Yeah. You want to hear everybody's reactions and questions and then there's always a missing chapter that you should have written and a point that you could have made much more clearly that you didn't think of until you got the, like, okay, well, what about this nine times? I mean, this is how James Clear did Atomic Habits.

It's a series of tweets and blog posts that became a book. You're right. It probably is better to do something resembling the book tour before you actually write the book. But also significantly harder to book media for a book that doesn't exist yet, I suppose. That's probably a thing. Yeah, that might be true.

Yeah. You wrote not to ask for feedback, but ask for advice instead. I love this little practical hack-tip technique, whatever. Tell me about this, because I love the idea of asking for advice instead of feedback. But why is it important in the first place? It's an easy one. So a lot of us, when we want to get better, we know we need feedback.

We ask people for feedback. And then we end up meeting cheerleaders and critics. The cheerleaders applaud our best self. The critics attack our worst self. And that can be demotivating and demoralizing. It actually, it's not that helpful to just be told all the things you did wrong yesterday. It's not always helpful either to be told all the things you did right yesterday that can make you complacent. What you want are coaches who see your hidden potential and help you become a better version of yourself.

And the easiest way to get people to become coaches is to stop asking for feedback and start asking for advice. If you say, what's one thing I can do better? People will give you pointers you can use tomorrow. They're more actionable. They're more concrete. They're more specific. They're less threatening. They're also less likely to just praise you and make you think you don't need to grow.

This is something I learned actually during the public speaking journey when I asked people for feedback. They told me the things that sucked or they told me the things they liked. When I asked them for advice, I actually started getting things that I could use. I got, oh, it would be really great if you tailored this to our industry or to our region. I know you love evidence, and that's what you do for a living. But we also want to hear your personal experience. Your stories help to bring these ideas to life. So don't shy away from putting your own narrative in the conversation.

And all of a sudden, my speaking changed because I was getting suggestions. And I think, I don't know that we should abandon feedback in all situations, but I think most of the time when we ask for feedback, we'd probably learn more if we asked for advice instead. That advice certainly sounds better than what was the other one? I hate, you look like a Muppet or something. I mean, that's hardly actionable, especially if you actually look like a Muppet. There's just nothing clearly you could do that. I mean, Jordan, they never even told me which Muppet.

So I don't know what to do with that. No, that's the problem with it, right? is it's like, oh, crap, there's a lot. The spectrum is quite wide of which Muppet you can look like, and none of those could be a compliment, but some are worse than others, that's for sure. Yeah, yeah, man, oh, gosh. That's funny feedback, but probably not at the moment you read it.

I'm imagining at the moment you read it, it was less hilarious. I don't remember being amused at all. It was, I mean, it was kind of devastating, actually. What am I supposed to do about that? Have I chosen the wrong career? Should I quit now? Right. Oh, man. It's kind of the feeling.

wrote something else that really stuck with me, which is that people who are obsessed with their work, they put in, I should say, we put in longer hours, but generally don't perform any better than their peers. And that is kind of distressing, but also good news, because it means we can maybe chill the hell out and still do well. Yeah. I mean, if you look at the evidence, effort has diminishing returns. I think anybody who's ever been married to a workaholic or had a roommate who was one, has seen this. Our 16 of work today is so much lower quality than, you know, our seven or eight was that at some point, if you care at all about, you know, your ability to be creative or even just the energy that you're bringing to the table, you have to set a boundary there. And I think that this

is probably common sense, but not common practice. Part of that is just American culture right now in startup culture and even creator culture. I mean, you read about these YouTubers that they quit and you go, why are you quitting? You're like one of the most famous people in the world on YouTube. And they go, I haven't been home for the holidays in seven years and I'm 25. Like, I need to take a week off. And I feel pressure to be putting content out every four minutes. Yeah. Yeah, like I'm doing a TikTok about ordering a salad at sweet greens because I, otherwise the algorithm is going to kick me down a notch. It's just, we're sort of incentivized

in all the wrong ways, either by the platforms that we use or by pure work. alcoholism or by looking at somebody else who just did a TikTok and we're like, oh man, I took a nap. I better make three TikToks now. Or I can try to be efficient and make a TikTok of my nap. Yeah, right. Exactly. Hey, film this. Film this. If I do anything funny, cut it up. Yeah, the burnout is real. You mentioned bored out. Is burnout just you work too much and bored out is just there's no challenge left? What's the difference there? I think that's part of the puzzle from what I've read. I think the big problem when we look at burnout is you're overloaded. So you're overwhelmed. Too much work or it's too hard. Whereas with Borough out, it's the opposite. You're understimulated. So as you said,

there's not enough challenge. Or it's just, it's repetitive and monotonous to the point that it just sucks the life out of you. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Adam Grant. We'll be right back. If you'll like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are all in one place, Jordan Harbinger.com, That's a searchable page with every code. And hey, if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, just email me. Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com.

I am more than happy to surface that for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Adam Grant. Tell me about perfectionism. Does that play a role in any of this? Because I think going back to sort of the creator example, a lot of these people, they'll tell me the amount of time they spent on a production of something. And I'm thinking, that's good if you love it.

But if you don't love it, that's way too much time to put into filming two guys having a conversation. Like, it looks great with the smoke in the background and the table and the lighting. But like, unless you really love the $25,000 video setup that you did, it's not worth it. It's just not. But these guys, and in fact, it's not just guys, but for some reason it usually is, they're just beating themselves up every single time. And again, some of it's the platform, right?

The views, if they get views or likes, it's good. they don't, that it's terrible, regardless of how good it actually is in their own mind. But it seems like this can really kneecap you. Yeah, I think I've lived this one personally as well. Well, actually, I thought I'd recovered from perfectionism. And then I wrote a whole chapter in the book on it. And I was writing the hidden potential quiz to give people a chance to assess their character skills and identify a strength in an area for growth.

And like any self-respecting psychologist, I took my own quiz. and my biggest area for growth was perfectionism. So I failed the perfectionism test. And I guess that means I'm still in recovery, which is unfortunate. It is unfortunate. I mean, there are plus sides, right? It keeps you motivated. But also, and we did a whole episode on this with John Aikoff years ago, episode 632.

It's not fun when you're in that, right? It's like any other addiction. It's not healthy at the end of the day. This is what I experienced. It's also what I've read in the research. Tom Curran has done meta-analysis, studies of studies, looking at what happens to perfectionists, and turns out they burn out at higher rates because they're constantly ruminating and beating themselves up and putting unreasonable levels of pressure on themselves. I definitely was guilty of that.

But the other mistakes we make, which I think you're foreshadowing here, perfectionists end up basically trying to optimize the things they can control. And that means that too often they're perfecting things that don't actually matter, these tiny details and overlooking the big picture. So you've created the perfect video said, but you didn't put enough prep into the content or the guest. And in many cases, they also aren't taking risks. The goal of perfectionism is to eliminate every flaw in every defect. And that means whatever has worked for me in the past, I'm going to rinse and repeat that. Interesting.

I'm not going to experiment because that might fail. And I don't want to feel like a failure. And that means I'm stunting my own growth. Yeah, that's a really good point. the idea that you are afraid to take risks slash grow because you might fail because of perfectionism, which is the opposite of how you get good at anything. It's the opposite of how you make a great show. I'm going to only do stuff that's worked for me in the past is not a good recipe for loving your career in 10 years from now.

That's for sure. No, it doesn't create the trial and error that would allow you to innovate and, you know, ultimately discover maybe there's a better method. Maybe there's a better way. Early in my career, I only talked about dating and relationships. And then one day... I remember those days. Remember those days, right?

Yeah. And lo and behold, you start to get sick of it, especially when you're married. Like, it starts to get really weird. But before that, I was starting to burn out. And I remember a friend of mine was, he's like, oh, man, my friend, we got to go out for a beer, you got to hear this story. And it was like this guy who had smuggled drugs and he got caught. And then he ended up having to almost go to prison.

And he was like an FBI informant. And I was like, this is so good. Somebody should turn this into a podcast. Too bad my show's only about dating and relationships and it has no place there. And I just was like, you know what? Screw it. So I did the episode. And I was like, hey, in the beginning, I said, hey, this has nothing to do with dating

and relationships. It's just a crazy story from a friend of a friend. If you don't want to hear it, then just skip to the next episode. And we got more feedback on that episode than I expected and probably more feedback on that episode than I'd gotten on any show previously. And people were like, more of that. That's fascinating. is before true crime was like a genre of podcast. This is just, wow, I never heard a criminal

talk about crime before openly because it's audio. So his face wasn't shown. He's like, I don't, there's no repercussions from this. It's some weird niche podcast. So then I thought, oh, I can actually just have really interesting conversations instead, and that's what my show will be. And that blew this thing up like crazy. Because now I'm able to talk about what I'm interested in in all different fields and I never would have discovered that if I was like, no, it's got to be perfect. Let's stick to dating and relationships because that's where I control the whole thing start to finish and I know what I'm going to get at the other end. So interesting.

It makes me think there are probably some things that you were curious about but that didn't resonate for your audience. And that's a learning opportunity as opposed to, oh, I brought that guest, that episode didn't do well. Now I'm toast. Right. Yeah. There was almost no danger of that, right?

I just like, I get one bomb if this bombs, especially if I warn people at the star, hey, this might be a stinker if you just want to hear about dating. And people are just like, I'm sure some people did skip it. They're like, I don't care about some drug dealer. Who cares next?

But they weren't like unsubscribe because they were like, I was going to go back to his normal thing next week. So that was a big deal, a big learning. And I still feel like I push the edges of stuff sometimes. And yeah, sometimes you get negative feedback, especially if it's about like Hamas and you do the wrong thing at the wrong time.

You know, he's, But that's, I think you do grow as a creator and you really do have to do that. Because, man, burning out or getting bored out is a real danger that most people don't think of. They're like, oh, my hours aren't bad. I'm not burning out. But if you're doing the same damn thing, even if you only work five hours a day, that's just as bad. Yeah, there's also, I think there's an audience risk too. The audience can get bored out on the same topic over and over again. And I think that's why minimum you want different variations on your themes. But I think broadening your topics over time is one of the easy. easiest ways to maintain their curiosity and also fuel your curiosity, which is last time I checked what podcasting is all about.

People listen because they're curious. It's true. And I'm even talking about the guy who's an IT administrator somewhere and is like, I'm not burned out. I can do all my work in three hours because I have all these automation set up. And unless we get like a DDoS hacker or whatever, I'm not going to work more than four days a week, three hours a day. But they're bored out of their mind because they don't have a challenge.

nothing is evolving, I'm not suggesting they break their IT network so that they can fix it or something. But I feel like we see letters in our Feedback Friday inbox that are about bored out that we just didn't have a term for it. Yeah, I think that's right. And so much of this is about then trying to bring novelty and variety into your routine. I had a chance to test this out recently. One of my most boring tasks is editing as a writer. I think anybody who writes even emails, right, it's like, it's more fun to figure out what you want to say than it is to refine the words because there's no more discovery in that. I feel like I'm a football team on the one yard line, and it takes as much work at that point to get to the end zone as it did to march the 99 yards

down the field. And I'm like, I'm getting nothing out of this, but I know it matters to the audience. I need to find a way to make it more motivating. So one of the things I decided to do recently was I just, I tried to write in different voices. One of my editing goals was, all right, I tend to be pretty cognitive, abstract, I need more emotion and vividness. I try to rewrite this paragraph in Maya Angelou's voice. It was such an interesting experiment because it sort of broke me free from the way that I'm used to writing and got me thinking about metaphors and, you know, some more evocative language than I would normally use. And let's be clear, what I wrote was embarrassingly awful. But it got me interested in editing again. And then I thought, okay, who are some fiction writers who are

really good at those skills that are maybe a little bit closer to my style and voice. And so I tried a John Green paragraph in a Maggie Smith sentence. And that's for me a small example, but it really made a difference in terms of my level of engagement in a task that I normally avoid. That's a really interesting way. I'm trying to think how you can do that with podcasting without sounding really weird. Like, all right, I'm going to do the show. But instead of me being myself, I'm going to act like someone else. I mean, maybe it's a show you never air. I don't know. Well, I think what you could do is you could take a couple of podcasters that you really admire whose styles are different from yours and make a list of of what are the questions they would ask this guest. I would imagine, I haven't tried this actually.

I'm curious now. If you come up with 10 or 20 of those, one or two have to be worth trying. Sure. Yeah, like this is me being Guy Raz or something like that. Or the, I'm drawing a blank on this very famous podcaster, but this American life. I read Glass. Yeah, of course. Ira Glass. I don't know what's wrong with me today. And just write those questions and just think about it in his voice and then yeah, you're going to end up with those very different but possibly super creative ways of looking at the conversation. When I was younger, I guess I really did do this with stuff with like Larry King. I'm like, what would Larry King do aside from just show up totally unprepared? Sorry Larry, but you know it's true. But even that was partly kind of, he really

liked doing that. He would show up unprepared and he's like, I just let my curiosity guide me, which was revolutionary in 1960 or whenever he started. One thing he told me in a bathroom at Sirius XM in New York once as he goes, I bring my own personal life into the conversation. I bring the audience into me. And my friend was there and he's like, that was advice. And I was like, hey, that was brilliant in 1960, 1970, when radio guys were leaning over with their fedora and they were just basically talking about something and nobody even knew their name. They were just a disembodied voice. Larry King was one of the first guys to be like, hey, it's me. It's me. I got my personality here. Got my kid over there. My wife's over here. I'm talking about something

that happened this morning that seems unrelated and now I got rapport with the guests. Like that was all new pretty much. And that was genius at the time. So I can see why this would be helpful because you kind of stumble across some of those same things. Yeah. And in some ways, it goes back to the point of maybe, you know, sometimes the curse of knowledge makes it really hard for the expert to teach you. But if there are ways you can emulate them, that's a step toward growth. You wrote something that I'm curious if this is science or just something that sounded clever in the book. You said, often the advice we give others is the advice we need ourselves. Is that actually something we can back up or is it just like, well, actually, that just sounded really good. And I tweeted it

and people liked it a lot. Can I say both? Yeah, it could be both. It's both. Yeah, what led me to this realization was I was reading some research. This was Laura Cray's work and also Igor Grossman's. The basic finding is what's called Solomon's Paradox, which is a lot of people give better advice to others than they apply when making their own decisions. I think everybody's had that experience. Have you ever talked to a friend through a tough decision? Like, wow, I'm actually pretty good at this. Yeah, of course. Yeah.

And I'm like, when I have grappling with the same decision, I'm terrible. What's wrong with me? Yeah. So the psychology of that is self-distance is really powerful. When you look at your own problem or dilemma, you get stuck in the weeds and you end up with a spread. sheet of like 19 different factors to consider on which job to take or which school to go to or where to move. And then you're trying to figure out how to weigh them all. When you give somebody else advice, you're further removed. And that makes it easier to zoom out and say, okay, there are really

three priorities that you ought to consider here. And I would choose, let's rank order them. And I would choose the option that's best on the top one. And so I think if you apply that process, anytime you're struggling on a decision, if you find somebody else who's stuck on it and you give them advice, that will give you the perspective you need to handle your own dilemma. Yeah, I like that. I didn't even think about the idea that distancing yourself from the issue is kind of the key. That explains a lot. We do the Feedback Friday advice segments and I'm always like, would I have thought of this if this were my own problem? The answer is almost always no. Nope. Because I'd be so pissed at the person, I would just do the dumbest thing possible and get

myself in trouble. Or I would just be too busy venting to my wife about it to have come up with this elegant solution that seems almost obvious when I'm writing it for somebody else who's got the same issue. That's quite subtly genius in a way. I know we're running out of time and I really want to get to some of these other points here because there's some genius stuff in here. Tell me what others having low expectations of someone does to that person. You have this way of flipping that around to becoming an advantage when you're doubted by somebody. Yeah, if you're doubted by the right people. So this is my colleague Samir and no Mohammed's research. What he shows is that if you're an underdog as opposed to a favorite, if the people who are doubting you are not credible, they don't

know the task or they don't know you, that can actually become fuel. And you say, who are you to question me? I'm going to prove you wrong. And Samir shows that if you can give people low expectations from observers who lack credibility, they will actually work harder in response to that. That's funny. And I think this is, we can't control naysayers, kind of anybody who's on social media is going to have someone doubt them at some point. Sure. So what Samir shows is that you can actually harness those as motivation. That's also, really good news because I will say being doubted by experts is so much more rare than being doubted by nobody's especially look if we're looking at social media I don't get people

who I respect you're not dropping into my DMs being like by the way your latest show terrible you should just give up right it's random people with like a cartoon character your best work is behind you Jordan right it's always random people with a cartoon character image zero post zero followers and zero following and it or whatever and it's like hey your show sucks I heard an ad for it. It's the worst thing I've ever heard. And I'm like, okay, so that stuff is not in short supply. And it's pretty cool that you can use this to be motivational.

But it's a little counterintuitive because if somebody's an absolute nobody and unqualified, why would that motivate me to work more? Like, they don't really know anything. Why is that motivating? It seems like it shouldn't be. Oh, that's such a good question. I've never thought about this. I think you're right.

I mean, intuitively, the moment you realize the person's not credible is the moment you should stop caring what they think. Like completely. Completely. I mean, it should be irrelevant. Right. If only we weren't wired to be such social creatures. So I think you could do some evolutionary hand-waving about how, you know, the fear of social exclusion is adaptive.

Maybe that's a factor here. I think, though, that, like, social disapproval hurts. And it hurts viscerally before you stop to think, like, does this person's view actually matter to me? Right. And I think that, you know, it's often hard once the emotion is activated to make it go away. And so it's easier than to channel it and say, all right, I'm going to show that person that they were wrong than it is just. to ignore them once they've riled you up. That is, it's important to remember that, I suppose,

because especially if you're doing the aforementioned taking risks in your creator and you're doing something, you're going to get the peanut gallery being like, I hated this. Stick to what you know, dumbass. I mean, that's just like garden variety appetizer for a creator who's doing something that is not their usual thing. So, yeah, that's a little superpower there

that you can turn that into motivation. Imposter syndrome, we've done a lot on this, episode 127, we did a whole article about it, but tell me why imposter syndrome is a sign of hidden potential. I never really thought about it that way. I hadn't either until I read Basima 2Fix research. She was one of our doctoral students, and she showed that when you feel like an imposter, you often end up going above and beyond. And I looked at this and said, okay, this is interesting because imposter syndrome is the opposite of being an underdog. As an underdog, you feel like other people are, they're actually underestimating you.

As an imposter, you fear that they're overestimating you. Well, the reason that's a sign of hidden potential is you can't see all your strengths. We all know we have blind spots. We forget that some of those blind spots are actually bright spots. They're capacities for growth that are invisible to us. And if there are multiple people who have high expectations of you, it usually means they've recognized some kind of latent ability or motivation or room for improvement that you just, for a variety of reasons,

your biases, your lack of experience, you can't recognize yet. And I think this is really hard for people because we know more about our own histories and our own experiences than anybody else can. And so it feels like, well, if other people have high expectations of me, but I'm lacking confidence, I'm right, they must be wrong.

What we forget, though, is that other people are more neutral, they're more independent, they're more objective. And if multiple people believe in you, you should probably believe them. That is lovely. You're right. Imposter syndrome, when you go to Harvard, everyone raises their hand and says they have it. If you give the talk at Apple, they make sure their boss isn't in the room, and then they raise

their hand saying that they have it. And everyone in law school was like, I don't belong here. They're going to figure out. I'm a fraud. The only groups that I've talked to that don't have it are high school kids because they're all so concerned with looking cool that they would never admit that they had this, even if they were being honest in the first place, right? So the idea that high performers tend to have it has always stuck with me, but this is definitely why.

It's the reason high performers tend to have this is they are always sort of moving up faster than they feel safe doing. Because they're managers like, Tom can handle it, he's on top of. Angela is the best person we have on this, and Angela is like, oh my God, I've only been here for two years, and they're giving me this project. They're going to fire me if I blow it. And it's because everybody else sees that they can do it. But of course, except for them, that makes a hell of a lot of sense. Yeah, and I think this goes to the reversal of confidence and success that I think so many people overlook, which is a lot of people think, I've got to build my confidence before I can take on a new challenge. And that is backward.

In most cases, you're not going to magically wake up one morning and suddenly feel confident. You actually build the confidence through taking on the challenge. And so it's the leap that you don't feel ready to take yet, that as you take it, as you embrace that discomfort, you then say, okay, I am capable of doing this. And then your confidence can rise as a result of taking the risk. I think you're right. I think imposters end up doing that. They're like, well, I don't feel like I know what I'm doing yet. But what do I know? These other people who are credible, who are knowledgeable, they think I can do it. Let me give it a try. And then we'll find out. Yeah, it's tough to surrender to that, right? Like, well, maybe they're right that I am qualified. It usually only goes in the other direction.

Maybe the person who has zero followers on Instagram and dropped into my DM. Maybe that person's right. Not the person who's worked with me for five years on every project so far and has vouched for me. Right? That guy, he doesn't know what he's talking about. That's a recipe for misery. Well, yeah, which we're all cooking up somewhere in the back of our heads. I know we have very little time left.

You give this astronaut example in the book, this guy who applied to be an astronaut to a zillion times. I'll let people go get that in the book. But the point was he grew up, he picked strawberries as a migrant worker. It sounds like the message from this, or one of the messages from this anecdote, was that overcoming adversity is a major benefit or asset to some of these more elite positions. Is that an overstatement or is that really what you're saying here? Like somebody who really starts off far behind, they have so much more distance to travel. So it almost, it sort of flips its on its head. It's the people who are starting with the worst conditions and have made it the furthest are actually maybe those with the biggest

advantage at the end of the day? I don't know. Maybe I'm getting this wrong. I think that's a really interesting way to capture it. I think you're onto something there. I think that when we look at people, early failure followed by later success is a sign of character skills. Because it usually means that they face some kind of obstacle, a lack of opportunity or a lack of talent, some form of adversity and then they were able to overcome that and if you look at their trajectory it shows a rise and usually behind that rise is you know they had the proactivity the pro-social tendency the discipline the determination to face adversity and then grow through it. Adam Grant, I know you got to run. Thank you very much for doing the show. Another one in the

books. I'd ask you what you're working on next but you're just going to lie to me and say I'm not writing a book for a while but I've already seen this movie. Okay, wait a minute. I have to get you to rethink that, Jordan. Okay. I'm not, not planning to write a book. I just don't know what it's about yet. Got it. But as soon as I figure out the topic, I am going to write it.

And in the meantime, go blue. All right. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show about the evolved strategies of human mating. So I'm an evolutionary psychologist, and I'm very well known in my scientific communities. I talk to people about mating all the time, and I learn something practically every day from people. So our predictions of what is going to make us happy are known to be off base.

Sometimes people pay a lot of attention to the mate attraction process and not enough attention to the mate retention process. Men and women have overlapping mating psychologies, but in some domains, dramatically different mating psychologists. It's become fashionable to try to argue that men and women are really identical in their mating psychologists and their sexual psychologists, but they're not. I think that's it's one of these kind of ideologically driven agendas. And we know scientifically that the areas in which they differ. You know, I think one of the myths is that somehow we're supposed to meet the one and only when we're at a very young age and live perfectly happily ever after for the next 50 years with no bumps in the road. And I think that's just naive. There's a new body of research that talks about the dark triad, and the dark triad is also more likely to cheat.

Dark triad is high narcissism, high Machiavellianism, and high psychopathy. People who are both men and women who are high on these dimensions are much more likely to cheat. You want to avoid those in a long-term mate for sure. Avoid emotional instability and avoid narcissism and potential mates. To learn more about what people want in a mate, successful tactics of attraction and more with Dr. David Buss, check out episode 758 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. You know, Adam may actually have found something that liberals and conservatives can agree on. If somebody overcomes adversity and climbs a rough path, progressives love that we're celebrating their victory over adversity. If somebody puts in a ton of hard work at a level most people

would never be able to sustain and essentially makes inborn talent or lack thereof the least important factor in their success, conservatives love this too. So I think we can all get behind this concept of hidden potential and measuring our success by how far we've come as opposed to where we began. So I really like this concept in part for that reason. I think it's really smart to look at things that way. It's a really interesting way to flip this stuff on its head. And hey, if you're one of those people who's come a long way and you didn't have all the advantages starting out, well, now you know that Adam and I and many other people are patting you on the back. It's really about how far you've come and not how you begin. As Adam writes in the book, we don't evaluate a diamond

by how it looked at the start. We evaluate how it responds to heat and pressure. All things Adam Grant will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. You can also ask the AI chatbot there on the website.

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